A figure of absolute importance in the Italian art scene of the early 20th century, Camillo Innocenti fully embodies, through his research, the enthusiasm of that group of artists who, rejecting the radicalism of the avant-garde, identified a possible path towards modernity in the confrontation between Italian tradition and the demands of the international scene. Although the centrality of his role was already recognised by contemporary critics and recent literature continues to count him among the protagonists of the Italian “Belle Époque”, his work has not yet been fully classified and understood. This must have been compounded by the confusion generated by the proliferation of counterfeit works and misattributions on the auction market, particularly due to his homonymy with the older Guglielmo Innocenti, who was too often confused with Camillo, despite the obvious stylistic differences between their respective works.

Born in Rome on 14 June 1871, the son of architect Augusto Innocenti, Camillo Innocenti trained under the guidance of the Nazarene painter Ludovico Seitz, who wanted him to collaborate on the decoration of the vaults of the Galleria dei Candelabri commissioned by Leo XIII. There he had the opportunity to study and observe closely the masterpieces of the Renaissance, from Raphael to Michelangelo, in an apprenticeship that proved to be indispensable. From the outset, however, he was more attracted to the free forms of contemporary painting. Between the late 1880s and early 1890s, he began to frequent the studio of Antonio Mancini, whose material research and chromatic impetus profoundly marked the language of the new generation of painters. It was Innocenti himself, in his autobiography published in 1959 by Pinci, who recalled the overwhelming effect of his Roman master’s painting: “As soon as we began to see Mancini’s paintings, we young people completely lost our heads,”[1] he wrote, recalling how his family reproached him for “running after a madman”. Works such as Ragazza con i papaveri (Girl with Poppies, private collection) date from this period, in which the female figure is juxtaposed with a rich and lively floral composition in an iconography clearly reminiscent of Mancini.

Innocenti was also struck by the paintings of Francesco Paolo Michetti, whom he had the opportunity to meet together with Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom he presumably met in Rome in the literary circles of Cronaca Bizantina. In the same context, as he recalls in his autobiographical memoirs, he was introduced by Guido Boggiani to some of the most representative figures of the literary scene of the time, including Angelo Sommaruga and Adolfo De Bosis[2]. In a letter dated 1895 addressed to the critic Ugo Ojetti, who was a close friend, Innocenti recounted how he had “fallen in love” with the Abruzzese poet during a stay at the Francavilla al Mare salon, where, alongside Michetti, he had the opportunity to discuss art and literature at length[3]. The encounter with both proved decisive in the development of the folkloric subjects that would bring him so much success in the early Venice Biennales. One example is Le buranelle (Ascoli Piceno, Pinacoteca Civica), in which, in addition to references to Michetti, echoes of Ettore Tito’s painting can be seen.

Still on the subject of his literary acquaintances, it should be noted that, during the same period, Innocenti also came into contact with Luigi Pirandello. He recalled that he had done a pastel portrait of him, which is still preserved by his heirs; the writer, for his part, paid tribute to him by dedicating the volume Erma Bifronte to him, which opens with a flattering letter addressed to the artist[4]. Innocenti also gave Pirandello a photographic reproduction of Giuramento di Pontida (Rome, Istituto di Studi Pirandelliani), a painting from 1898 that earned him the Pensionato Artistico Nazionale: the first of a series of important awards, strongly supported by Domenico Morelli, a reference figure for the young painter. The influence of his Neapolitan master emerges in many of his early works, especially those with historical or sacred subjects, such as The Temptation of Christ in the Desert (Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon), The Holy Family (private collection) and Antony and Cleopatra, the latter presented as his final essay for the Pensionato.

His encounter with Giosuè Carducci was also linked to the aesthetic circle of “Cronaca Bizantina”. Such was his admiration for the Tuscan poet that he inspired him to paint a solemn portrait, “in the pose of a seated Greek wrestler, from the Diocletian Museum, with the stormy Tyrrhenian Sea behind him and the Muse playing the lyre”[5]: a courtly representation that foreshadowed the posthumous iconography of the poet consigned to myth. The painting, executed in 1904, was presented in the same year in Novissima by Giuseppe Chiarini, a friend of Carducci and his first biographer, who recounted that he had been invited to view it in the artist’s studio by Edoardo De Fonseca, the magazine’s long-standing editor[6]. Novissima marked a decisive turning point in Camillo Innocenti’s career: in the 1906 issue, he chose to present to the public for the first time a series of drawings executed the previous year, depicting young women captured in intimate moments of everyday life, executed with such fine and skilful strokes that Diego Angeli compared them to “certain dry, summary sketches by the Parisian Helleu”[7]. With this new production, aimed at the magazine’s educated bourgeois audience, Innocenti seemed to want to claim artistic dignity for a visual imagery that, in Italy, had until then been confined almost exclusively to illustrated magazines, advertising graphics and fashion, but which in the rest of Europe dominated exhibitions and collecting. The Roman painter thus began to explore this repertoire in painting as well, immediately establishing himself as one of the most appreciated interpreters of modern life and feminine beauty.

It should be remembered, however, that Innocenti’s first major successes, even internationally, were due to his modern reinterpretation of peasant subjects. In 1904, he won the gold medal at the World’s Fair in Saint Louis with Canzone ciociara (private collection), a work inspired by the traditions of the village of Anticoli Corrado, characterised by fluid brushwork and bright colours. The following year, at the Venice Biennale, he received further recognition with another gold medal for Sui monti (Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum), exhibited in the Sala del Lazio together with In piazza, the latter purchased by the Ministry of Education for the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. According to sources at the time, it was John Lavery[8], an Irish painter who had made England his home, with whom Innocenti established a fruitful friendship, who wanted to reward him. He drew inspiration from his research for a clear and vibrant style of painting, especially in his elegant subjects, in keeping with the bourgeois taste of the time. In the wake of the artist’s influence, and more generally of the latest international trends, Innocenti identified the figure of the modern woman as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, so much so that he soon earned the nickname “painter of feminine grace”. This direction met with widespread approval at the 1907 Biennale, but it was at the following edition that he achieved recognition, when a solo exhibition of twenty large canvases was organised for him, introduced in the catalogue by a critical essay by Ugo Ojetti[9]. The exhibition elevated the painter to the Olympus of the greatest contemporary Italian artists, propelling him to international fame. The works presented documented a profound updating and a renewed sensitivity to painting, especially in his society paintings and female portraits, through a skilful and elegant touch and a language open to comparison with foreign figurative culture, as demonstrated by the evident affinities with the work of Sorolla, Lavery and Zorn. His commitment to rural subjects, which, as we have seen, was at the origin of his early successes, was also documented. Among the works exhibited on that occasion, the monumental diptych entitled In Sardegna, created in the summer of 1908 during a trip to the island, as attested by a letter to the critic Primo Levi and published by him in the magazine “Nuova Antologia”[10], in an article dedicated to the presence of regionally inspired works at the Venice Biennale. This is a particularly significant testimony, which reveals Innocenti’s interest in the theme of costume, not only from an anthropological point of view, but above all as an element of aesthetic value. The diptych was one of the most highly acclaimed works by critics at the 1909 Venice Biennale. It is not known exactly when the artist decided to separate the two canvases, thus giving them autonomy: one is now in a private collection, the other is presented here. In any case, the painting was exhibited several times abroad at a time when Innocenti was showing a marked enthusiasm for international comparison. In 1910, he was a member of the Italian commission at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels, and the following year he held the same position for the International Exhibition in Rome at Valle Giulia, making a decisive contribution to the selection of foreign artists invited to participate. In the spring of 1910, he stayed in Paris: it was a period in which, driven by a desire for renewal, Innocenti – like other Roman painters of the time – approached the Divisionist technique with greater conviction, adopting it to achieve effects of vivid luminosity and harmony, as in the case of the present Turbante rosso, an emblem of the modern woman, immersed in the artifice of neon light. The dialogue with research developed beyond national borders, in this specific case with Anglada, proved decisive for him, especially in a context in which there was a growing urgency to overcome the provincialism and backwardness perceived in the Italian art scene: it was precisely in this climate that the experience of the Roman Secession matured, of which he was one of the founders in 1912. “It was in my studio that people began to talk about ‘Secession’”, he recalled in his autobiography, emphasising the role he played in defining the markedly international character of the group’s first exhibition.

Fully immersed in the international climate and sensitive to the latest developments in European art, thanks in part to his numerous travels, Innocenti stayed in Bern and Innsbruck between 1906 and 1907: it was most likely in this context that he became interested in Austrian Secessionist painting. In 1912, he returned to Paris, where he rented a studio on Avenue de Ternes. Among the most significant encounters of that stay, he recalled in his memoirs his meeting with Auguste Rodin[12]. On that occasion, he also came into contact with the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune gallery, with the intention of ensuring the presence of works by modern French painters at the first exhibition of the “Secessione” and of organising a solo exhibition, which he obtained for the following year. The exhibition, presented by Gabriel Mourey and inaugurated on the same days as the first Secessione exhibition in Rome, was a remarkable success. Innocenti seemed to win over the French critics, who emphasised his enthusiastically cosmopolitan character: Arsène Alexandre, writing in Le Figaro, described him as “an observer, an enchanter and, at the same time, a fantasist”[13]. His success was then crowned by the purchase by the French state of his 1905 painting Corteo nuziale (Costumi di Scanno – Abruzzo), now in the Musée d’Orsay.

As is well known, however, with the approach of the conflict, the international exchanges that had characterised Roman artistic life in the first decade of the 20th century, culminating in the “Secession” experience, were drastically reduced. Tastes were changing irreversibly: the spotlight was now on the new generations. But Innocenti, before gradually withdrawing from the contemporary debate – devoting himself for a period to set design and costume design for the cinema – never ceased to follow with interest the developments in elegant European painting: a choice that earned him considerable criticism, such as that received at his solo exhibition at the Galleria Geri in Milan in late 1917[14].

In the aftermath of the war, his fashionable painting no longer seemed to arouse the same enthusiasm that critics had shown him until then, nor did it seem to find favour with the market, which was now oriented towards a more severe and rigorous monumentality. The artist then turned his gaze towards new horizons. Specifically, towards Egypt: in 1923, he obtained a solo exhibition at the Italian Circle in Alexandria, Egypt. Back in his homeland, he exhibited at the Second Roman Biennale, presenting works inspired by his recent trip to North Africa, in which the recurring sinuous arabesque lines seem to anticipate the most refined results of the Art Deco style. In 1925, he set sail once again for Egypt to take up the position of director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cairo, a post he held until 1940. During this long period, in which he also worked as a court artist, his presence on the Italian scene became increasingly sporadic. Only at the outbreak of the Second World War, with makeshift means, did he manage to return to Rome, spending the hardest years of the conflict on the Adriatic coast. Far from the glories of the past, he died in the capital, aged almost 90, on 4 January 1961.

Manuel Carrera

[1] C. Innocenti, Ricordi d’arte e di vita, Rome 1959, pp. 55-56.

[2] “It was at that time that I became friends with Guido Boggiani […] He was a great friend of writers and journalists, and I frequented the offices of Cronache Bizantine with him, where Giosuè Carducci often came and where I met De Bosis and Sommaruga”: Innocenti, Ibid., pp. 71-72.

[3] M. Carrera, Camillo Innocenti prima della Secessione. Incontri e scambi tra arte e letteratura (Camillo Innocenti before the Secession. Encounters and exchanges between art and literature), in M. Carrera, J. Nigro Covre (eds.), Secessione romana 1913-2013: temi e problemi (Roman Secession 1913-2013: themes and issues), Rome 2013, pp. 41-51, in particular pp. 45-46.

[4] See Innocenti 1959, op. cit., p. 65.

[5] Ibid., p. 67.

[6] G. Chiarini, Il lottatore, in “Novissima: albo d’arti e lettere”, year IV, 1904.

[7] Didacus [Diego Angeli], Illustratori di libri, in “Novissima: albo d’arti e lettere”, year VI, 1906.

[8] V. Pica, Artisti contemporanei: Camillo Innocenti, in “Emporium”, 1909, vol. XXIX, no. 174, p. 411.

[9] U. Ojetti, Mostra individuale di Camillo Innocenti, in VIII Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 1909, Venice 1909, pp. 79-82.

[10] P. Levi l’Italico, Italia in “maggiore” e in “minore” all’esposizione di Venezia, in “Nuova Antologia”, 1909, CXLII, no. 902, pp. 196-197.

[11] Innocenti 1959, op. cit., p. 60.

[12] Ibidem: ‘I went to Rodin’s studio in Paris together with the Count of S. Martino. The way Rodin received us was very strange. We spoke to him in a completely empty room because he had apparently been the victim of a number of thefts of drawings that he cherished greatly. He promised us some sculptures but kept me there for a long time to explain how they should be lit. I remember one that had to be placed perfectly against the light. […] Rodin then came to Rome, where he was celebrated by artists and given a banquet at the Castle of Constantine on the Aventine Hill. In attendance were the Mayor of Rome, Ernesto Nathan, the Count of S. Martino, the French Ambassador C. Barrere, Ettore Ferrari, Lerche, Nicolini, Bazzani, Noci…’.

[13] ‘He is an observer, a charmer and a fantasist all at the same time. […] Camillo Innocenti is exhibiting forty paintings and a large number of drawings at the Bernheim Gallery, which will showcase the main features of his talent, one of the most original that young Italy has revealed to us in recent years: A. Alexandre, La vie artistique. Les Expositions du Jour, in “Le Figaro”, 2 April 1913, p. 4.

[14] R. Giolli, A Milano. Carrà e Garbari alla Galleria Chini – L’Intima della Famiglia Artistica – Innocenti alla Galleria Geri – Scattola e Pellini alla Galleria Pesaro, in “Pagine d’arte”, 1918, no. 1, p. 14: “Innocenti comes to give lessons in foreign painting to these good but ignorant provincials of Milan, he who has at least seen it in Rome, and who copies Anglada and all the others, always passing by, as talented as he is, rushing through everything with illusory skill”.